Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture: Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870Ruskin, John
Philosophy
Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture: Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870
Ruskin, John
Sculpture
And in their doing all this, they stand as masters of human order and
justice, subduing the animal nature, guided by the spiritual one, as you
see the Sicilian Charioteer stands, holding his horse-reins, with the
wild lion racing beneath him, and the flying angel above, on the
beautiful coin of early Syracuse; (lowest in Plate XXI.)
And the beginnings of Christian chivalry were in that Greek bridling of
the dark and the white horses.
206. Not that a Greek never made mistakes. He made as many as we do
ourselves, nearly;--he died of his mistakes at last--as we shall die of
them; but so far as he was separated from the herd of more mistaken and
more wretched nations--so far as he was Greek--it was by his rightness.
He lived, and worked, and was satisfied with the fatness of his land,
and the fame of his deeds, by his justice, and reason, and modesty. He
became Graeculus esuriens, little, and hungry, and every man's
errand-boy, by his iniquity, and his competition, and his love of talk.
But his Graecism was in having done, at least at one period of his
dominion, more than anybody else, what was modest, useful, and eternally
true; and as a workman, he verily did, or first suggested the doing of,
everything possible to man.
Take Daedalus, his great type of the practically executive craftsman, and
the inventor of expedients in craftsmanship, (as distinguished from
Prometheus, the institutor of moral order in art). Daedalus invents,--he,
or his nephew,
The potter's wheel, and all work in clay;
The saw, and all work in wood;
The masts and sails of ships, and all modes of motion;
(wings only proving too dangerous!)
The entire art of minute ornament;
And the deceptive life of statues.
By his personal toil, he involves the fatal labyrinth for Minos; builds
an impregnable fortress for the Agrigentines; adorns healing baths among
the wild parsley-fields of Selinus; buttresses the precipices of Eryx,
under the temple of Aphrodite; and for her temple itself--finishes in
exquisiteness the golden honeycomb.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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